Thoughts and opinions of an occasional blogger.

Perhaps because the bar has been set so extraordinarily low, men expect to be rewarded for every teeny tiny gesture during sex that isn’t 100 percent selfish. Every man who isn’t solely focused on his own orgasm thinks he’s a feminist gift to all women, and low-key believes he deserves a pat on the back for every good sex deed he performs. Here are 15 sex things guys get way too hyped about.

1. Going down on you for approximately 15 seconds. So great that you’ve finally realised oral sex feels amazing for most women, but don’t act like you’re god’s gift to women just because you did the bare minimum of oral required to look generous and #woke. If you’re gonna go down there, make it count!

2. Making you orgasm one single time. Oh, haha congrats, it’s the 16th time we’re hooking up, and you finally figured out how to make this enjoyable for me and not just you. Excuse me for not giving you a high-five for this.

3. Making a big deal of saying, “I love it when you come.” Buddy, literally all of us get some amount of enjoyment out of making our partners orgasm. It feels good to make the person you’re boning feel good. You did not invent orgasm altruism, and I refuse to give you the Nobel Prize you so crave for this.

4. Being “cool” with whatever pubic hair situation you have going on. I see that you’re trying to be “woke” and accepting of my hygiene routine, but pal, none of this is for you, and none of it requires your commentary or approval.

5. Letting you know it’s OK if you don’t want to give them a blow job. Yeah, obviously it’s OK for me to never do anything I don’t want to do, but thanks for the permission.

6. When you ask what they like, and they say, “I like whatever you like ;-).” The best is when they say, “I just like turning you on.” That is not an answer! Just please tell me what you like so this experience can be enjoyable for both of us.

7. Pausing mid-thrust to stroke your chin, stare into your eyes, and say, “You’re so pretty.” I can see how men would think this is romantic and cool because it’s in a lot of movie sex scenes, but eye contact does not make IRL women melt and fall instantly in love.

8. Telling you they want to wait. My personal philosophy is that guys think women will throw themselves at them if they say some shit like, “I care about you too much to have sex with you on the first date.” What they don’t realise is this is just another way of saying “I can’t respect any woman who would slut it up with me on date one, and I respect you, therefore we can’t fuck.” OK, pal. That’s just fancy slut-shaming and I can see straight through it.

9. Offering to get a condom. Women go through hell to make sure they stay baby-free on their terms, so excuse me for not jumping for joy when you offer to go buy a £5 pack of condoms that’ll keep us from passing STIs off to each other.

10. Realising your nipples exist. Who is spreading the rumor that all women love it when men suck on their nipples like breastfeeding infants for five minutes per nipple during foreplay? Somehow each man who does this thinks he’s the first to do it, like he’s the Indiana Jones of boobs. The best is when they peep up at you with their little eyes as if to see how much you’re loving all this tiresome nipple action.

11. Realising your clit exists. Honestly.

12. Anything that isn’t missionary. They especially love to do that thing where they throw your legs over their shoulders, so you ended up folded in half like a pretzel while they bounce around on top of you. I love the enthusiasm behind wanting to do fancy things in bed, but maybe check to make sure your partner is enjoying herself before you get all proud.

13. Marathon oral sex sessions, just to prove a point. I’m talking, like, the dude’s been down there for 20-plus minutes, you are more than ready to move onto the next thing, but he insists, insists, on making you come first. How do you politely tell someone, “Please stop, my vagina has lost all feeling, this is ludicrous.”

14. How long they can last. Look, an hour in, this is just starting to get physically painful for me. I don’t care how long you can keep that thing hard. The best sex lasts no more than 15 minutes, excluding foreplay. Anything else is just a meaningless, hyper-masculine bragging right.

While the majority of us are incredibly house proud and feel rewarded by cleaning our homes within an inch of their lives, we probably don’t put the same amount of effort into the other place we spend up to 40 hours each week – the office.

Which might be why Hassle.com, the UK and Ireland’s leading marketplace for booking a trusted cleaner online, have compiled the 10 dirtiest items in your desk space, just to give you an idea about where to spray the disinfectant asap.

1. Water Cooler/Dispenser

The prime opportunity to sneak away from your desk (and catch up on office politics), but a known magnet for gathering all kinds of nasty bacteria, with 2.7 million germs per square inch on the average water spigot, according to the Public Health Organisation.

2. Office fridge

Bacteria thrives in an environment of slightly gone-off sandwiches and 12 day-old milk. An office fridge should be cleared out every two days, especially when the average fridge contains 7,850 bacteria colony-forming units per square centimeter.

3. Microwave

Depending on the size of your office, the microwave can be used up to 30 times each day, harboring a combination of meat and vegetable particles, and creating a nest for bacteria. Germs need warmth, food and moisture to multiply, and allowing the internal top to be splattered with food particles can cause a potential health risk.

4. Soap dispenser

You’ve downed your morning coffee, gone for a bathroom break and wash your hands with the soap dispenser. However, you would be wise to be wary of just how dirty the dispensers can be. A study by the University of Arizona found that a quarter of office dispensers are contaminated with fecal bacteria. If you wash your hands thoroughly, that’s fine, but be wary of the amount of germs you gain just before you wash ’em.

5. Your desk

With more than 10 million germs to be found on the average work desk, it accommodates 400 times more bacteria than a toilet seat. To keep your work space clean and healthy, wipe down weekly with an antibacterial wipe or vinegar-based solution.

6. Your keyboard

Keyboards are notorious for harboring bacteria, especially as we press every single key continuously for up to 8 hours each day. Skin cells, food residue and sweat mature and spread in such a small space comparatively. with more than 3,295 bacteria per square inch, shake and wipe down your keyboard weekly with a slightly damp cloth.

7. Your mouse

Given that your hand can also be placed on a mouse for up to 8 hours each day, they are heavily exposed to bacteria generated from sweat, food particles and dust. With 10% of office workers admitting to never cleaning their mouse, a study found that they can contain up to 1,676 microbes per square inch. A toilet seat has only a fraction of that number!

8. The printer and copier

With everyone battling it out to get their copies printed on time, the average printer and copier machine is touched up to 300 times a day – especially the interface and touch pad. This makes it a key nesting ground for nasty bacteria. Simply wipe over the surface and keypad with a PC wipe before each use.

9. Your headset or headphones

It’s common to see colleagues sharing headsets, but before each use, but it would be wise to find your own and store them for future use. Bacteria spreads like wildfire thanks to hair fibers, sweat and earwax, potentially causing facial and ear rashes as well as lice. After one hour of use, bacteria and germs can increase 700 times!

Technology has been put to some great uses over time; sharing information, enabling air travel, helping us find dates when nobody wants to speak to us in real life. But up until now, there’s been one glaring hole in the capabilities of technology: fixing broken hearts.

Break-ups are never nice. They drag on and on, make you feel like shit, and smudge your mascara on the daily. So thank god for the arrival of new app, Mend, created by former Google employee Ellen Huerta, which claims it’ll cure your heartbreak.

The app, Mend, which offers the first week for free, will act as a “personal trainer for heartbreak”, according to The New York Times, guiding you on how to deal with your ever-changing emotions and helping you avoid making awful decisions like Facebook stalking your ex or texting them in the middle of the night when drunk.

The app consists of a ’28 day heartbreak cleanse’, which requires the newly single person to listen to a short audio excerpt every day to help you. The user’s progress is then tracked, giving them visible evidence of their emotional improvement, as well as offering “breakup advice 24/7 from our amazing community”.

And to be fair, this could be a real help. When I was broken-hearted, I suddenly developed this weird habit of googling incessantly, trying to find stories of other people who were in the same situation as me so I wouldn’t feel so alone. Which is why I think the feeling of a shared community and active encouragement to feel better in your own time is definitely something that would help people experiencing a a break-up start to feel more ‘normal’ again.

The app is gender neautral, not identifying users as either sex and only referring to your previous partner as “your ex”, so as not to assume it was necessarily a heterosexual relationship. And that’s another positive, maybe this gender anonymity might help men – who as a general stereotype tend to keep their emotions about a break-up to themselves as opposed to opening up about it – address their feelings and help them get over their former partners.

So now you know where to go when your heart next gets broken. There’s nothing like having a plan in life. What do you think about this? Would you give it a go if you were heart broken and struggling to get over a failed relationship? I’d love to hear your thoughts as always….

One of the most difficult parts of dating in 2017 is that sometimes, it can feel a little bit too casual. Connecting with people has never been easier, but we have so many options and opportunities that it makes sense to spread out our energy and keep things low key. So if we really like someone, we don’t reveal our feelings until we’re sure they’re going to be reciprocated. But we can’t count on the person we’re seeing to be any braver than we are. Mild apathy is the order of the day, and we can waste months asking our friends about the hidden subtext of a message that just says “‘Sup?”

The trouble is that it’s hard to know whether the person you like is playing it cool, or simply not bothered. And you deserve someone who is bothered. Someone who will be bold and brave and make you feel like you’re living within the pages of a lavish love story, and not an advert for insurance where someone absent-mindedly pets a dog on the head. No matter how much you think you like someone, it’s really only worth pursuing them if they’re going to pursue you back. The earlier you can see that it’s not meant to be, the sooner you’ll be back on the path to finding the perfect person. If any of the following signs apply to your current relationship, it’s time to look elsewhere.

Messages are short, factual, and don’t contain any questions

If they’re replying with one word answers, they’re not busy or mysterious – they just don’t want to have a conversation with you. It’s possible to send a lengthy text from a train or a toilet. We treat our iphones like they’re a third hand. If they never message more than two sentences, or get in touch just to say they’re thinking of you, it’s time to stop thinking about them.

They don’t plan dates

Someone who likes you will be desperate to take you to their favourite restaurants, the prettiest parks and the buzziest bars. Someone who doesn’t care about a proper relationship with you will, if pressed, say “Um, dunno. The pub?”

A past partner keeps coming up

If they have children from a previous relationship, their partner is always going to be part of their life – but otherwise, any excessive mentioning of an ex is a bad sign. Someone who likes you will want to make you feel as though there was never anyone else for them. It’s the Garden of Eden and you’re Adam and Eve, or Steve. But if the ex keeps coming up, they’re probably going to sneak back in. Stay away.

They have vague plans to leave the country

If they keep going on about a grown up gap year, and that they’re saving up for six months in Thailand “in a year or so” move on, before you get hurt. They’ll probably never go, but it’s a signal that they’re not serious about including you in their future.

They’re quite self-contained

If they’d rather go out with no jacket and get hypothermia than leave something in your house and have to retrieve it. They’d go five miles out of their way to find a library before they’d borrow a book from you, just in case they have to commit to staying with you while they read it. They’re not doing a Marie Kondo life declutter – they just don’t want to leave a trail of evidence that indicates you were ever together.

You never meet their friends

This person would drag you into a bush before they let you bump into their own mum. If you do see one of their colleagues at the pub, they might drop their hand, move their chair away and stare into the distance. No one lights up with recognition when you introduce yourself – but they might look slightly uncomfortable.

They avoid serious topics of conversation – especially about relationships

They drop dark hints about their unreliability, commitment issues and hereditary tendency to get rashes. They’re undecided about babies – “Maybe in ten, twenty years, they’ll probably invent the technology!” They are so worried that you’ll ask where things are going that they’d fake a power cut if they found you watching ‘Say Yes To The Dress’ on TV. They’re not the only one who can pull the plug – call time on it immediately.

Have you ever moved… a big move from your mum’s or a little cross-country move to take a new direction with your career? Are you making that huge leap to living abroad?

Right now, I am in the middle of a move. It’s a little move for me, but has been coming for many many months. As you might imagine, there is more than a little stress.

Change is stressful.

Change, regardless of why you are doing it, is stressful. There is always a feeling of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. You feel as though your entire life is being turned upside down. There are a thousand little details that have to be planned, organized, and executed. There is a huge overwhelming feeling. This sense of fear and being overwhelmed comes from our natural desire for comfort and stability. Any time the things around us change and move us out of our comfort zone, it messes with our heads and our emotions.

Moving is a double-dose of stress; you are in the middle of stress and you are leaving your comfort zone behind. Yikes! Doesn’t it make you long for the days that you had a blanket and could take your comfort zone with you? Maybe we can’t do that, but we can make it through with some sense of sanity.

While there is no way to remove all the stress, you can make things so much better by getting a plan together and staying organized. Set up your iPad/iPhone or a simple daily planner to keep you on track. Take the time you need to plan, whether this is 30 minutes or 2 hours. You will benefit tenfold by eliminating all the worry. You can easily set aside half of your stress by not worrying about what you have forgotten.

Here are some quick tips that will help you stay organized.

Step 1: Write everything down. Get in the habit of writing down all of your thoughts, tasks, and plans. This will help you get out of your head and into action. Many times, we are so worried about getting stuff done that we actually can’t move.

Step 2: Declutter, declutter, declutter. You know those boxes that are still in the attic, unopened, from the last move? Just take them right out of your house now! You can choose to drop them at your local charity shop or throw them out; either way, get rid of the stuff. You do not need to move clutter. Do you really even need all the stuff that you have? Have you thought about living with 100 items or less? Okay, that might be a bit extreme, but think about how much less stuff to move you would have.

Step 3: Keep a notebook: a central location for all of your lists, appointments, and phone numbers that you will need. There are often a lot of little details. Making sure they are all in one place will make a huge difference. Dare I say, break out the spreadsheet and use it to plan each step of your prep, move, and post-move to-do lists.

Step 4: Designate. Whenever you can assign tasks to other family helpers, don’t be afraid to ask for help. A lot of the time, the resource that you are the shortest on is time. Let the teenager next door entertain the kids, or have the kids go to a friend’s or grandma’s house. It is surprising how much you can get done without the distraction.

Step 5: Always take care of yourself. It is very easy to say you have no time for the gym or to eat correctly, but you need these things to keep your energy high and to relieve stress. Connect with a support person: your best friend, your minister, or a life coach.

Whether moving is something you want to do or need to do, it is going to be stressful. You are going to have some good days and some bad, so take each day one at a time. Really focus on staying organized, taking things in bite size pieces, and taking care of yourself. With a little planning and organization, you will make it through with your sanity.

We all make terrible decisions sometimes, but that doesn’t mean your friends should stop supporting you through them – especially if you know it was wrong. Whether that means cheating on a partner, making a bad move at work or slagging off one of your mutual friends, a real friend will support you and help you through it, not turn their back on you.

2. They don’t make an effort with your new partner

Difference in personalities happen and it’s not uncommon for your friends not to get on with your S/O for whatever reason – but if they actually valued your friendship, they should at least try.

3. They tease you about your insecurities

We all have insecurities (or if you don’t? YOU GO GIRL) and tend to take the piss out of them as a defence mechanism, but that does NOT give your friends the right to tease you about things you’re not comfortable with. A joke is a joke, playing on your sensitive side is not.

4. Your parents don’t like them

Real talk: if you mum doesn’t like them, you probably shouldn’t either. What was it that Justin Bieber sang? Because he might not be a boy of much sense (most of the time, anyway), but he’s got it spot on there.

5. They’re not good at admitting when they’re wrong

We can all be stubborn and sometimes struggle to admit we’re wrong, but that doesn’t mean you should allow someone to put you down all the time – especially if they are obviously and morally in the wrong. Always be suspicious of someone who can’t apologise for their mistakes.

6. They make your other friends feel inadequate

If you’ve got friends in one group that make your friends in another group (whether school, uni, work etc etc) feel bad because they ‘don’t know you as well’ or ‘don’t see you as much’, this isn’t OK. They’re all your friends, so the chances are they’d get on well if they gave your other mates a chance.

7. They don’t respect your house

Mates that treat your house like their own is fine, providing they contribute to the endless pieces of toast they eat and actually tidy up the mess they inevitably create. If not? Get rid, yo.

8. They’re rude about things you like

It’s normal to have different tastes from your friends and to like different things, but that doesn’t mean to say they can openly and actively slag off the things you care about – especially considering they should be the ones with your best interests at heart.

9. They’re aggressively competitive

And in turn make you feel weirdly embarrassed about sharing your achievements, namely because they always try to get one up on you and make you feel like you achieved little in comparison to them. This is probably not the case.

10. They tell people things about you that they shouldn’t

If you tell them something in confidence or share your secrets with them, only for them to tell their boyfriend because “they tell each other everything”, that is not OK. A friendship has just as intricate

11. They make plans without you

They see other mutual friends behind your back and try to keep it a secret – only to accidentally let it slip and pretend to feel guilty about not inviting you. It’s a no from us.

12. They bring drama into your life

They’re the one that always cause beef at a birthday party, get too drunk on the night out or accidentally-on-purpose end up matching with someone’s boyfriend on Tinder. If there’s something causing agg in your friendship group, you can rest assured they’re at the middle of it all.

13. They cancel plans with you last minute

With no real rhyme or reason, they flake out on you at the last minute to make you feel inadequate or like they’re more important than you. Sometimes this might be great but most of the time? It’s not.

14. They don’t make you happy anymore

Friends should be for fun times, having a laugh and emotionally support – so if they’re not offering any of those things – even if they once did – then it’s probably time to get rid and make some new friends. A happy past doesn’t necessarily equal a great future, so don’t be afraid to wave goodbye if the negatives start to outweigh the positives.

If you’ve dated/slept with/husband-ed (is that a verb yet?) a lawyer/solicitor/barrister, the chances are you’ll relate to these 17 points on an emotional level.

1. He’s surprisingly not great at watching legal dramas with. Because he’ll pick holes in absolutely everything and be all like “that’s not how it actually happens”. DON’T RAIN ON MY SUITS PARADE, OK?

2. He will think he’s right about everything. Whether that involves Marge Simpson’s middle name or who last did the washing up, he’s very good at believing he’s right.

3. He’ll have very strong beliefs – and of course, thinks they’re all absolutely spot on and that there is no alternative. “Yes brie is the best cheese and I’ll argue until the early hours about why I’m right.” (ok ok so not quite but you get the idea.)

4. He’ll work looong hours and whatever’s going on in the office won’t be far from his brain. But in some ways this is good because it means you really appreciate the time you have together.

5. A lot of the time, you probably won’t really know what he’s talking about because there’s loads of detail to everything and it’s all very fact specific. Or maybe that’s just me. Do other people understand these things? DO THEY?

6. He’s incredibly confident and/or arrogant. You’ll have moments when you think ‘I still can’t tell if my boyfriend’s insanely cocky or just has mega confidence and we’ve been together for three years.’

7. He’s argumentative. He argues for a living for Christ’s sake, so anything that involves a bit of conflict or disagreement at the dinner table? He’s down for it.

8. He appreciates a good suit. Well, doesn’t everyone?

9. They get invited to lots of fancy events which may or may not involve having a plus one. Dinners, drinks, mixing with potential clients – you probably know the drill.

10. They’re not great at losing at anything, so your cute date over the Scrabble board or playing tennis is probably off the cards unless you fancy nursing his ego afterwards.

11. He’s got a very good memory. All that law training, university lectures and memorising text books off by heart wasn’t for nothing – as now not only is he a trained lawyer now, but he’s also got a fab memory. Agh.

12. He’s quite good at turning on the charm at any given moment, because he’s used to having to do it with work colleagues or potential clients. He’s a HUGE hit with your family.